Understanding statistics and survival rates for lung cancer

Statistics can tell us many things about prognosis and survival but are based on large groups of people and cannot be used to predict what will happen to an individual. How long someone will live with or beyond lung cancer depends on many factors—the type and stage of the cancer, where it is located, the overall health and gender of the patient and how the cancer responds to treatment. Here are some tools to help you understand how to interpret cancer statistics and survival rates, how they are calculated, and what they mean to you, the individual.